Yesterday, Stop Street Harassment posted its largest report on gender-biased street harassment ever, and the findings are pretty damn alarming. With a survey of 2,000 people and interviews with 10 focus groups of marginalized people across the United States, they've reviewed how women and men, both LGBT and heterosexual, experience street harassment: how often, what kind, and how it affects them. It's shocking. (Did you know that people are actually moving neighborhoods and changing jobs because of this stuff?)
Maybe you did, and maybe these numbers don't seem quite so crazy to you, but they did to me. Without further ado, some of the report's key statistics:
65 percent of women and 25 percent of men surveyed reported having experienced street harassment in their lifetimes.
Of the women who experienced such harassment: 41 percent had experienced physical aggression in public, 23 percent of women reported non-consensual sexual touching, 20 percent had been followed down the street, 14 percent had been flashed, and 9 percent had been "forced to do something sexual" while out and about.
And 4 percent of survey takers said they made a big life decision because of harassment, like quitting a job or moving neighborhoods.
But if the numbers don't quite jump out at you, SSH made plenty of infographics to illustrate their findings, below:
Pretty staggering, isn't it? To me, the most distressing tidbits are how young this type of harassment is starting (10 to 12 years old??), and how often things turn from an obnoxious catcall to a dangerous physical confrontation. I mean, I've always considered it a problem, but without an agency like Stop Street Harassment to collect data like this, I guess I just didn't know how bad it was. Kudos to them for making such a comprehensive effort to draw some attention to this issue. But now this bigger question: What can we do about it?